When undertaking a marketing campaign many businesses and agency's take a blanket approach, being of the mindset that if you get in front of enough people with your product then you will convert some sales. To a certain extent this is true, but there are two questions that you should ask yourself when marketing especially to a specific geographic area.

This question seems quite easy to answer, word of mouth is by far the strongest form of advertising surely. After all you have a happy customer sending a qualified customer who is in the market for your products and services straight to your door at no cost to you. People telling people about your great service has to win hands down right? Well yes but without internet presence that reflects your standard of service or without information that is key to a customer making a decision to buy, or if you can't be found via a Google search easily word of mouth can be useless. I mean there can't be that many "Smith and Son's" around can there?

The owners of Yellow pages used to turn over Billions now they are in massive debt & struggling (see this article from the telegraph) Why has a household name with such market dominance found it's self in so much trouble? Well in short the story goes like this.... back in 2002 when the general public where starting to get to grips with the internet the google maps listings used to be provided by Yell and link back to businesses on Yell.com. Yell were having significant success through yell.com and 10's of millions of visitors via Google every month, in their opinion the paper based directory would never die and they where to be kings of the internet, this isn't quite how it happened.

Stimulative advertising is an advertisement that a prospective buyer see's by chance and is stimulated into contacting the advertiser and/or purchasing the product. Things like bill boards, news paper & magazine advertising, T.V. advertising & radio advertising are all forms of stimulative advertising.